Don’t keep that money bottled up

Our opinion: New York’s unclaimed bottle deposits would be best spent on environmental protection. It’s time to stop shortchanging a fund to that effect.

Follow the money trail, New Yorkers. Keep track of the numbers and take note of how they add up to a clear case for common sense. See how a state government woefully short of money can meet its obligation to protect the environment after all.

Times were decidedly better when New York established the Environmental Protection Fund in 1993. The intent was to use the taxes on real estate transfers to help pay for environmental policy at its most fundamental level. The money would go to land acquisition and protection — particularly forests, open space and farms — and to recycling and waste management.

As recently as four years ago, some $250 million a year went into the fund — enough for the Paterson administration to regard it less as a means of environmental protection than as a handy way to help bail out a state government that was beginning to drown in deficits.

The result is that the fund is now down to $134 million.

For once, though, there’s no need to argue that the state needs to find the funds to pay for services it used to provide. The counterargument, that the state can’t tax its way back to the level of government we used to have, is moot as well, as least on one front.

Money that could come quite close to replenishing the Environmental Protection Fund is there already — in the form of some $115 million a year in unclaimed bottle deposits.

It’s time that a law that was first passed 30 years ago be put to even fuller use of serving as an environmental safeguard.

There’s a reason for the nickel deposit that’s required for every bottle or can of water, soda or beer you buy. The bottle law is, and always will be, all about eliminating litter and promoting recycling.

Yet it was an incomplete law for nearly three decades. The bottling industry used to be able to keep the money that wasn’t reclaimed when cans and bottles weren’t returned. A 2009 fix, which gave the state 80 percent and beverage distributors just 20 percent, meant prevailing over a industry that spent rather heavily on lobbying and campaign contributions to keep that money.

It’s better, obviously, to have the state getting most of the money. Ideally, though, that money should pay for an essential role of state government that has gone underfunded.

The Environmental Protection Fund is short about $45 million for farmland acquisition, for instance. To delay such funds means running the great risk of losing open space that might better be preserved and forever altering the landscape of New York, especially upstate.

The money trail leads, eventually, to political progress. Sen. Mark Grisanti, R-Buffalo, chairman of the Environmental Conservation Committee, wants all $115 million in unclaimed bottle deposits to go toward environmental protection. The Cuomo administration is at least interested in the idea.

“This means the money would be used to grow the EPF,” says Laura Haight of the New York Public Interest Research Group.

That’s also a nice way of endorsing a sound policy with a critical caveat. There’s little point in putting bottle deposits into the fund but then diverting even more of the real estate tax transfer revenue elsewhere. This should be more than a zero-sum game.

2 Responses

Seems our greedy legislators can’t keep their hands off of anything. How is it the Government some how feels entitled to bottle deposits that have yet to be reclaimed. I have cans that I have kept since 2008, they aren’t unclaimed, just waiting.

However, the state should not be in the business of buying private lands, ownership of the land need to remain with the people not the state; this is classic Marxism – Policy statement 1 Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

However, since the funds come from the production of beverages and the sale thereof, those funds should be reinvested in those products. I say use the excess money to reduce taxes on the bottlers.

Since the bottle bill became law in the early ’80s, the Consumer Price Index has increased by about five times. That nickel deposit should now be TWENTY FIVE CENTS. Five cents is so little now that people are tossing bottles and cans everywhere again.